754: Frankly Asinine Questions

This week, the world finally discovers what we've been saying for years: Gen X wasn't forgotten—we were quietly keeping the entire damn machine running. New Census numbers show America's 45-to-64 crowd is shrinking fast, which means the people who know where all the bodies are buried (and why you never reboot that one production server) are disappearing without a replacement bench. Meanwhile, Meta continues its speedrun toward becoming history's most aggressively unlikeable company, staring down a potential $1.4 trillion lawsuit over social media addiction while simultaneously launching AI features that happily remix your Instagram photos unless you remember to opt out of Zuckerberg's latest privacy experiment. Because nothing says "we've learned our lesson" quite like doubling down.

The AI circus somehow gets even weirder. Illinois actually passed meaningful AI safety legislation—an event so rare it qualifies as science fiction—while Sam Altman reportedly floated the idea of AI companies handing the U.S. government an ownership stake. Anthropic published another paper that's already inspiring breathless declarations that Claude is "thinking," because apparently matrix multiplication now counts as an inner monologue. Cloudflare finally decided websites shouldn't have to give away their content for free to AI crawlers, researchers discovered AI agents could consume enough electricity to make Google Search look like a bicycle generator, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk is being replaced by the very AI it spent two decades secretly training. Progress: where everyone works harder, gets paid less, and the power grid cries.

Elsewhere in Tech Hell™, Waymo robotaxis turned San Francisco traffic into an even bigger parking lot, Google lost another multibillion-dollar antitrust appeal in Europe, the FCC found fresh ways to make internet bills less transparent, and Midjourney is demanding Hollywood explain its own AI habits in court. We also dig into a disturbing lawsuit involving Grok-generated abuse imagery and what it says about AI guardrails, explain how to stop Meta from feeding your Instagram into its latest AI experiments, discuss why tech workers increasingly feel AI isn't replacing them so much as making them miserable faster, and close things out with the usual Media Candy, Apps & Doodads, and library recommendations to help you survive another week inside the techno-dystopian fever dream we apparently call "the future."

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Show notes at https://gog.show/754

Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/xnhzMxu1JNA

SHOW NOTES

America's missing middle: The shrinking 45-64 population

Meta is facing $1.4 trillion in state lawsuits over social media addiction

Meta just launched a new AI generator, Muse Image, and users are already pushing back over use of their photos

Illinois Drops the Hammer on AI Companies

OpenAI reportedly wants all AI companies to give the US government a stake in their businesses

Lawsuit: Man used Grok to make 7K sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself

Midjourney wants the Hollywood studios that sued it to show the court how they use AI

Anthropic Releases Paper About Claude’s Mental ‘Workspace.’ Don’t Read It Uncritically

Cloudflare will filter out web crawlers that serve AI companies

When It Comes to Energy Use, AI Agents Could Make Chatbots Look Like Pocket Calculators

Amazon’s ‘Artificial Artificial Intelligence’ Is Being Eaten by AI

Drivers Trapped for Hours in Hopeless Gridlock as Waymos Brick on Major Holiday

Google loses final appeal over $4.7 billion EU Android antitrust fine

FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees

Getty Images is canceling its $3.7 billion Shutterstock merger due to UK restrictions

Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her With a License Plate Reader

Meta says it will disable the camera on its glasses if you tamper with the recording LED

Meta tests ‘super sensing’ AI glasses that can capture every moment

How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two

Silo

Sugar

Dune: Part Three | Official Trailer

AI golem Tilly Norwood is reportedly 'starring' in a feature-length movie

Lucky

Normal

How to claim a WhatsApp username

How to Stop Meta AI From Processing Your Instagram Content

Gold Rush (First Contact) by Peter Cawdron

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